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Comment by samiv

3 days ago

I wish people who ship crappy software didn't ship it and would let someone else ship something better instead.

It really sucks when the first mover / incumbent is some crappy half assed solution.

But unfortunately we live in a world where quality is largely irrelevant and other USPs are more important. For example these little weekend projects that become successful despite their distinct lack of quality

Linux kernel - free Unix.

JavaScript - scripting in browser

Python - sane "perl"

Today on GitHub alone you can probably find 100 more featured and higher quality projects than any of these were when they launched but nobody cares.

11 comments

samiv

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ryandrake  3 days ago

While we're wishing for things that are never going to happen, I wish users would stop adopting crappy half-assed first-mover software, causing them to gain momentum and become the defacto/dominant solution.

  • samiv  3 days ago

    That's the other side of the value added coin. Users sometimes find value even in the half assed software.

    Someone was once talking about the "solving the right problem wrong" vs "solving the wrong problem right".

    • disqard  3 days ago

      > "solving the right problem wrong" vs "solving the wrong problem right".

      That's a really useful framing!

ghaff  3 days ago

WRT Linux. Sure, 1991 or really even mid-90s Linux was clearly immature. But Wall Street was adopting it instead of Solaris by the turn of the century. Plus "open source" so it wasn't the case of a new proprietary Unix just emerging from the sea foam which no one wanted anyway but Linux becoming the good enough Unix standard which is what people did want.

websiteapi  3 days ago

existing is better than not existing and those who move fast and ship crappy software first will win. learn the lesson :)

willi59549879  3 days ago

how does the Linux kernel lack quality?

  • ghaff  3 days ago

    It did in the early days, especially up until 2.4 which was generally considered the first enterprise-ready kernel version. (You can argue about whether the old "enterprise-capable" definitions still applied but they were a benchmark for a lot of people.) Of course, lots of ancillary stuff too in userspace and outside the kernel related to filesystems and the like.